Streisand's efforts to film The Prince of Tides began in 1986, when she first looked into Pat Conroy's bestselling novel. In the four years before the the first cameras rolled in the spring of 1990, Streisand saw the proposed film pass through the hands of three would-be producers, survive the collapse of one film production company and the near-fatal implosion of another. CBS and MGM/UA each owned the rights for a time, but both companies saw the film in modest terms, as an intimate, middle-budget drama, perhaps in the cast of Driving Miss Daisy or The Great Santini -- the sort of intelligent "sleeper" that would find its audience over time, with careful, gradual coaxing.

Streisand, however, saw The Prince of Tides as a much bolder screen work, one that could draw audiences quickly, and in large numbers. Her passion and confidence in the project confounded the Hollywood conventional wisdom. In the midst of a spate of brat-pack frolics and violent-comic buddy movies, Streisand was championing a philosophical motion picture whose plot hinged upon a man confronting childhood trauma and abuse at the hands of adults. The box office figures indicated that America was limiting its diet to denial and fantasy, but Streisand aimed to make a film that would cut through all that, a film that confrontated reality and sought (as her character, Dr. Susan Lowenstein, does) to heal the psychic wounds we so often prefer to repress.

Compounding the challenge, Streisand chose not only to direct the film, but to act and produce as well. Historically a few filmmakers--Orson Welles, Laurence Olivier, Charles Chaplin--had managed to play all three roles, but even with the support of the old studio system their efforts were sometimes greeted with only mixed success. More recently, Warren Beatty, Kevin Costner, and Kenneth Brannagh had pulled off their own respective hat-tricks, but all with more obviously marketable properties that could be sold, at least in part, as stories of war and adventure.

Streisand the star may have pulled a core of faithful to the box office, but Streisand the director made the picture work. The deftness of her touch is evident throughout, and compares very favorably with the work of directors at least a generation removed from contemporary Hollywood. The scenes of the children at play recall the unrestrained gentleness and innocence of George Cukor (one can't help but think of the opening of The Women, with mother and daughter rough-housing together), while the scenes of romantic love have an emotional keenness, a langourous sheen that is virtually absent from today's graphic, sex-driven cinema.

Most rewarding of all is Streisand's handling of the complex characters she has drawn from Conroy's book. Her direction has been compared to that of William Wyler, with whom Streisand worked near the end of his career (and the outset of her own) on Funny Girl. In certain respects, The Prince of Tides recalls the most rewarding and underrated of Wyler's films, Dodsworth (1936): Both pictures are driven by vividly textured, utterly seamless characterizations, filled with pain, joy, recovery and renewal, and both pictures feature somewhat improbable romantic leads. Like Walter Huston at the time of Dodsworth, Nick Nolte was a long established star, but it was not until Streisand cast him in The Prince of Tides that he finally achieved the level of charisma that characterizes a romantic leading man -- and no other director has been able to evoke such a finely tuned performance from him since.

The Prince of Tides established Barbra Streisand as a triple-threat filmmaker, but perhaps more significantly, it broke important ground for American mainstream cinema, charting new territory, a more challeging emotional and moral landscape than Hollywood had explored before. Moviegoers who would never set foot in a revival house suddenly flocked to the theater to take in the kind of elegantly charged filmmaking usually associated with Orson Welles or Marcel Carne. For Streisand, it must have been a vindication of the faith she had in the art of film itself, its ability to uplift an audience and draw from it the highest human feelings. Whenever a picture comes along that debunks the commonly held box-office wisdom, it represents a victory for film art as a whole. The Prince of Tides is that rarity in modern Hollywood, a work of passion and inspiration, a mirror of the artist's own grand aspiration, her long struggle and now indisputable success.
Bruce Eder

CAST
Nick Nolte: Tom Wingo
Barbra Steisand: Susan Lowenstein
Blythe Danner: Sallie Wingo
Kate Nelligan: Lila Wingo Newbury
Jeroen Krabbe: Herbert Wodruff
Melinda Dillon: Savannah Wingo
Bernard Woodruff: Jason Gould
Henry Wingo: Brad Sullivan

CREDITS
Director: Barbra Steisand
Producers: Barbra Steisand and Andrew Karsch
Screenplay by Pat Conroy and Becky Johnston, based on the book by Pat Conroy
Executive producers: Cis Corman and James Roe
Music by: James Newton Howard
Co-producer: Sheldon Schrager
Director of photography: Stephen Goldblatt, A.S.C.
Editor: Don Zimmerman, A.C.E.
Production designer: Paul Sylbert

About the transfer
This exclusive film-to-video transfer of The Prince of Tides was approved by Barbra Steisand. It was created using a 35mm low contrast print and a 35mm Dolby Stereo 2-track magnetic soundtrack print master. The Prince of Tides is presented in its original aspect ratio of 1.85:1.

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